414: The Pure Amateur is Vanishing: Why Everyone's a Performer Now

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. I was recently reading an article about The Great British Baking Show or Bake Off as we friends of this really, really fun TV competition call it. It was written by someone who'd been on the show and one of the competitors. They were talking about how looking at the show from the inside made them realize something very profound. There are no real amateurs anymore. And that observation kinda stopped me in my tracks and made me think. Because if even the people that are portrayed as Britain's best amateur bakers are in a way focused professionals, and they're competing on every level through all these stages, pre competition trials, to the eventual baking show finals with all the self presentation and ambitious dreams and those lucrative post competition baking book deals, then what is being an amateur or being a professional for that matter? It reminded me that we're living in this world where everybody is on social media. Everybody is self presenting, and everybody is presenting themselves very strongly and very focused to their field. People like Nikita Beer tweet that the best way to stand out is to talk about one particular topic 100,000 times and to present yourself as an expert in the field. That's how you get followers. Right? That's also advice that I personally have given to other people too. So if you want people to believe that you're an expert, just keep talking about the topic and keep helping people who are on their own path to expertise. That's the advice. But this reality in which we all get better at what we do publicly is very different from the reality of craftsmen and artisan in the past. And understanding this shift isn't just a philosophical musing. I don't think so. I think it has real implications for how we build businesses and create products and even establish ourselves as brands, as people, as experts in the digital economy. Our sponsor, paddle.com, the way you monetize software as a service applications and mobile apps has changed a lot over the last few years as well. And not only is there more competition, but there's regulation everywhere and that gets in the way in many places. That's why I personally choose to charge all my customers for all my software as a service things through a merchant of record. And for me, that is Paddle. They take care of all the taxes, currencies. They track the client transactions, and they update credit cards. So I don't need to do this, and I can just keep focusing on my competitors because I have to deal with them and not banks and financial regulators. So if you'd rather just build your product, check out paddle.com as your payment provider. Now think about this for a minute. Throughout most of human history, some people, most people really, were just good, really good at one particular thing for …